One of my goals with the Jack West series has always been to link all the cool ancient places around the world and also to retell many of our most famous and enduring myths in interesting and modern new ways.

And of those myths, Troy and the Trojan War has long been on my mind. And it’s such a famous tale—alongside the tale of Theseus and the minotaur—that I decided to keep it (and the Theseus legend) till the final book.

I love the idea that the horse was a ramming ship, rather than some kind of large statue. It seemed more ‘real’ to me.

Poor Bertie . . .

Not everyone can survive.

Then there are those other pesky Shadow Royals causing trouble on the surface, including a new character, the royal banker.

I loved introducing Sir John Marren in this book—although eagle-eyed readers will remember that he was named in 4LK, when he was elevated to the position of Duke.

Part of the fun of this series is building the shadow royal world, figuring out what mechanisms and bureaucracies it would need to function, and a banker/treasurer seemed likely to me way back when I introduced the idea of the shadow royals in 4LK.

I must mention that there is actually a real fellow named John Marren! He’s a lovely man and a great friend of mine! Not anything like the dastardly royal banker we meet in this book.

You draw from all the previous Jack West books for this one, from Jack’s sister to conversations with Wolf to flashing back to when Jack was in the military. You dedicated this book to your loyal fans for a reason!

Yes, the dedication was for exactly that reason: as a thank-you to my readers for following the story for so long. I’m very aware that my readers pay close attention to all the details in my books, so I tried to reward that in this book with many detailed references to the previous ones.

When I sat down to plan this final book, I thought readers of the series would really appreciate references to earlier books: to things like the Warblers and Wizard.

The reference to Jack’s sister is a unique one. That mention of Lauren, his sister, was something I put into The Six Sacred Stones way back in 2007. To be honest, I had planned to use it for a plot twist back then (it was going to be something like: Jack was meant to be on that plane with Lauren but for some reason, he didn’t catch the flight; the whole airliner was crashed in an attempt to kill him and so she was killed instead), but I decided not to follow that plot strand. But I still left the mention of Lauren in 6SS just in case I decided to use it at some point in the future.